The company is seeking to buy for-profit education companies in markets such as India, Brazil and China as well as websites and software that help people acquire new skills, Freestone said in an interview in Bloomberg’s London office.

“The fast growing part of the education market globally at the moment is people training to do a specific job and that can be a construction worker, an accountant, a lawyer, a financier, someone who wants to work in the hotel industry,” Freestone said yesterday. “The growth in that part of the market is running at about twice the level of students going into university currently.”

Pearson, which makes most of its revenue from education offerings in the U.S., needs to make up for a slowdown in its traditional markets as North American education sales shrank by 2 percent last year. Freestone, 53, says he wants to make London-based Pearson the “biggest and the best education company in the world and that can’t just involve being big in America.”

Pearson’s international education business, which grew 15 percent by sales and adjusted operating profit last year, accounted for almost a quarter of the 5.9 billion pounds in annual revenue.